White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Please Stop Conflating Math and Science

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Here is a plea: Save the children. Save them from being harassed by the best intentioned and most visible public figures.

Please stop haranguing them about “math and science.” Math and science are not the same thing; related, yes, identical, no.

Math intimidates a lot of children. It intimidates those who do not have an early aptitude for figures. Consequently, many young minds are lost to the glorious world of science because they fear that they must pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Math.

Now if one believes that little Joanne ought to be a high-energy physicist, chasing atomic particles about with an atom smasher, she ought to be encouraged in the study of mathematics. But if little Joanne wants to devote her life to zoology, she should not be scared off by math before she has seen a primate.

Yet that is what we do through the endless exhortation by those who believe that it is only through applied science and  mathematics that the United States will continue to retain its leadership and prosperity in this century. Wringing our hands over U.S. students' lagging scores in math and science – always spoken of as though they were the same thing – is now a feature of our national life.

Not a word is heard about how we dominate the world in film, recorded music, franchising, creative uses of information technology (Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), oil and gas drilling technology and medical device technology.

Our creative footprint across this world is enormous, and it is not yet being usurped except in areas where inexpensive labor and government indifference to human and environmental costs prevails.

Creativity and curiosity drive science. Math is a discipline of curiosity not of creativity; it is the tool, not the driver. It will tell the inventor, scientist and entrepreneur how to get there, but not where to go. The prescription for the future, coming from many politicians and leaders,including former admirals and generals, is more math and science education linked to a passion for entrepreneurism.

While the passion for a poorly defined concept of the entrepreneur among public intellectuals is white-hot, many of these people do not pass the entrepreneurism test. For example, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Gen. James Jones, former nationalsecurity adviser.

Lately both men have been at the podiums, preaching about a world of small business and individual risk. But they have not run small companies, bet their homes on startups, nor have run up credit cards to meet payroll. Accomplished men in their own right,  they have neither of them walked the entrepreneurial walk,  nor have they followed the math and science catechism.

The fact is most engineers need math in some degree, some scientists need a lot of math, but others need surprising little.

Also most people can boost their performance in a subject, if it is important to them to do something they really want to do.  People who need math can usually acquire the math ability they need to function where they want to be. That will not make them brilliant mathematicians. They will not opine on string theory or challenge obscure concepts of the nature of matter. But that need not, in the age of computers, keep them from, say, working as ocean geologists.

I was arguably the very worst math student who ever tried addition. But I got better when I started running my own business, and better still when I wanted to fly light airplanes. Truth is I was scared off by teachers with the math and science mantra.

For years, literature teachers have been scaring off students by suggesting that Shakespeare, Tolstoy or James Joyce are difficult to read and good for them. Now these math-and-science preachers are scaring off students from the adventure of science.

For the good of the future, let us stop frightening the children. Math to the left. Science to the right. Converge as needed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Energy in the Time of Elections: Claims and Counterclaims

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Where there's oil and gas, there's milk and honey.

That is the thrust of the American Petroleum Institute's  report to the platform committees of the Republican and  Democratic parties. It was previewed in Washington on May 15 by API President and CEO Jack Gerard, the oil  industry's man on Earth, known for his tough attitudes to just about everything, but the Obama administration in particular.

In unveiling the report at the National Press Club,  Gerard declared that the recommendations were without political slant and were delivered to both parties’ platform committees without favor; although it is  generally known that the oil and gas industry — and Big Oil in particular — cares not a jot for the Democrats. In a slip, while reading a prepared statement, Gerard referred to the “Democrat Party,” which is a term used by conservative commentators and members of the Republican Party who cannot stand the thought of  Democrats having a monopoly on the word democratic.

As expected, and in line with other recent utterances, Gerard called for accelerated leasing on federal lands, demanded more sensitive regulation, and declared his belief that the United States is potentially the greatest energy producer on Earth.

The White House shot back at API almost immediately, claiming it is the oil the industry that is lagging not the government.

Not to be outshot, Gerard said, “Once again, the  administration is trotting out claims about idle leases to divert attention from the fact it has been restricting oil and natural gas development, leasing less often, shortening lease terms, and going slow on permit approvals—actions which have undermined public support for the administration on energy. It is also increasing or threatening to increase industry’s development costs through higher taxes, higher royalty rates, and higher minimum lease bids.”

Even if the administration is right this time, it has a hard sell ahead.

In the case of natural gas, there has been a giant windfall from shale seams; but that has been coming for some time, and the administration can take no particular credit. Similarly, oil imports are down from 57 percent to 45 percent, reflecting increased domestic production, something that helps more with the balance of  payments than the price at the pump.

Gerard admitted that while natural gas prices are at historic lows because of new recovery and drilling technology, oil is priced internationally and that is no help to American consumers. API and its chief tend to conflate oil and gas to make a point. Likewise, they like to include Canada in “North American” energy.

But the energy claims of the administration are even harder to follow and more dubious. It likes to confuse fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil — with electricity and, in particular, with alternative energy, like wind, solar and, in a manner of speaking, nuclear.

Most energy gurus see the dawning of a switch from oil to electricity for personal transportation, for buses and some trucks. But that dawn is breaking slowly with consumer indifference, battery life questions and other problems, including the availability of rare earths for motors and wind turbines.

Experience suggests that energy is a lousy political issue. It is complicated; each side has its own facts and there is some truth to both sides’ facts.

At the end of the day, the energy debate is reduced not to the amount of drilling taking place on federal lands, or to the virtues of natural gas over nuclear, but to the price of gasoline at election time. If that is lower than it is today, President Obama garners votes. If it is up, no matter why, all the GOP and Mitt Romney have to say is that it is Obama's fault.

The money vote is known already: With a very few exceptions the energy money is on the GOP. But that is not new. What is new is that environment is not on the agenda. Better wait until 2016.

Florence Nightingale Still Comforting the Sick

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It is time to add May 12th to our list of dates worth commemorating — especially for 1 million in the United States who suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

This year marks 192 years since Florence Nightingale’s birth in Florence, Italy to wealthy English parents. As a young woman, she felt herself called to take up nursing. Later, her heroic work caring for wounded British soldiers during dark nights of the Crimean War earned her worldwide fame as "The Lady of the Lamp.”

Nightingale is given credit for inventing secular and modern nursing because she recognized that troops were dying, not just from their untreated wounds, but also from malnutrition and dehydration.

She followed up her war work by writing a landmark text for nurses and founding a training school in London. Her natural talent for numbers helped her keep detailed data on patients, and she ultimately won extra renown as a statistician.

But from 1857 Nightingale found herself often disabled by poor health, which some suggest may well have been Chronic Fatigue Syndrome(CFS). As a result, Nightingale now has been adopted as a kind of patron saint by for this under-studied disease. CFS sufferers here and abroad (17 million) commemorate her birthday as a kind of rallying point; their own lamp in the dark.

And the world of CFS is dark indeed — an abysmal place of unmediated pain, disability, hopelessness, financial ruin and sometimes suicide. One doctor told me that if she were to have to choose for herself between CFS and cancer, she would choose cancer. “At least for cancer, there are treatments; if they fail, you die. With CFS you are the living dead,” she said.

Everything about CFS is controversial. It has been on the medical agenda since 1934, when there was an outbreak centered on a Los Angeles hospital. Currently 63 outbreaks have been documented, but still what is not known dwarfs what is known.

What is known is that it is a disease of the immune system, related to and in some cases overlapping fibromyalgia, a disease of the muscles. It also involves the neurologic and endocrine systems. The disease has broken out in startling clusters – locations in Nevada, Florida, New York and California among others just in the 1980s.

Its deadliness is slow and subtle. Studies suggest that it takes 20-25 years off the average sufferer’s life, but there are no dramatic sudden deaths or gory symptoms to attract attention.

Expert virologists such as Columbia University’s Dr. Ian Lipkin agree that the disease may yet turn out to be viral. But the once-exciting report from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nev., targeting the XMRV retrovirus had to be retracted for faulty science.

Doctors are slow to diagnose CFS because if that is not the area of their practice, there is no easy diagnosis.

At present there are no bodily fluid tests, no imaging, no temperature transients. Nothing. Just very sick people; very, very sick people. Immune system studies, spinal fluid aberrations, and other biomarkers show promise and may be used to identify the disease some day.

Probably 75 percent of CFS victims start with some flu-like disease. Maybe 4 percent of people who come down with mononucleosis will get CFS.

Most sufferers' lives are turned upside down. Their first collapse comes without warning, usually following exercise.

Although memory and verbal-skills loss are often part of CFS, most victims remember exactly the day and time they were stricken. Laura Hillenbrand, who incredibly has written two best sellers, cannot leave her home and could not attend her own wedding.

Deborah Waroff, a New York writer has had CFS for 23 years. In September 2003 and all through 2004, she could do little more than lie on the living room couch. Waroff struggled back to the point of functioning a few hours a day. But two back surgeries in 2010 left her immune system at a record low level, and brought on another long-term collapse. She is back to two or three-hour spells of activity, but not on two consecutive days. “I've lost half of my adult life,” she says.

These stories are multiplied a million times. Being a victim can include abandonment by families, spouses and lovers, friends and colleagues, workplaces and insurance companies.

Florence Nightingale shone a light of hope from her lamp in the ghastly Crimean hospital wards. CFS sufferers hope that the spirit of Nightingale will shine a loving light into the darkness of their disease — lost as they are in plain sight of the world around them. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Murdoch Has ‘Unfit’ Company

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Rupert Murdoch, the 81-year-old chief executive of News Corp., has been told by a select committee of the British parliament that he is “unfit” to head his global media conglomerate.

It is a particularly British accusation and one that is especially punishing, both because it is so indelible and is so seldom used.

“Unfit” is not a charge that is often leveled, so its impact is especially great. In 1971 a publishing rival of Murdoch’s, Robert Maxwell, was indicted as being “unfit” to run a public company. His were sins of greed and venality.

Murdoch’s sins, you might say, are sins of encouraging a culture of corruption in two of his London-based tabloid newspapers: the defunct News of the World and The Sun. It should be said that Murdoch did not invent the culture of Britain’s tabloid press, but he encouraged it to lengths of excess that had not been dreamed of earlier.

Fleet Street — the collective name for British newspapers which derives from the street where they were once all located — has always been a place of excess. But things really turned white hot in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Television and radio were competing for entertainment value, but news was still the province of newspapers. The game was to shock the readers without depressing them. The publisher Lord Beaverbrook said during World War II of his Daily Express: “I want the readers to feel the sun is shining when they read the Express.”

When I arrived in Fleet Street, well after the war, the sun was still shining in the popular papers. And what better way to keep the sun shining than by exposing the foibles of the aristocracy, the Royal Family and, of course, film stars?

We, the denizens of Fleet Street, were modestly paid but were given essentially unlimited expense accounts to disport ourselves around the clubs and restaurants of London in search of the rich and famous at unguarded play. The culture was one of discover, speculate, elaborate and publish.

Reporters were pushed very hard to dig up the titillating, embellish it and present it as news. We descended on crime scenes, the sexually engaged and the overtly greedy.

Yet there were limits, unwritten but understood, especially pertaining to private grief and even the Royal Family. Infidelity from a vicar was reportable. Similarly rumored goings on by major politicians and national figures, less so.

But change was on its way in the shape of Rupert Murdoch, and in the growing force of television in British life. Murdoch trashed the barriers, such as they were. He started publishing pictures of bare-breasted girls in The Sun, and turned his tabloids from being newspapers that published gossip along with the news to gossip-only papers. They became vicious as well as tawdry.

Murdoch also turned his papers from leaning politically left-wing to being savagely right-wing. It worked.

The Sun and the News of the World started making enough money to finance Murdoch’s other ventures, including buying and building Fox News.

Murdoch established an even more irresponsible culture. There were no rules now: Hence the phone-tapping, police bribing and other sins that have brought Murdoch to his sorry state of being “unfit.” There was a new thuggery and vulgarity that had not existed.

Yet if Murdoch is unfit, so are his accusers. It is British politicians — including Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron and their followers — who indulged Murdoch, courted him and encouraged the arrogance of Fleet Street.

British newspaper publishers have always considered it their right to have access to the prime minister and no holder of that office has sought to disillusion them. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Case for Fixing Up America

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I’m asked with some frequency these days, what do I think the United States will look like in 25 years to 50 years? Underlying this question is a real concern that we’ve lost our way as a nation, that the best is behind us and a strong feeling that the generations to come won’t have it as good as we’ve had.

Actually, I think the United States will be fine. It’ll still be a world power, but not as dominant as it is today and was in the 20th century. I think we’ll still have one of the largest and most important economies in the world; that we’ll still be a powerhouse of invention; and that ourmovies, music and other entertainment forms will still dominate the globe.

American English will continue to be the international means of communication. Sorry Britain, there’s no license fee on language.

A rosy picture, eh? Not quite.

The second, and maybe the more important question, is what sort of country will the United States be to live in? This picture is less rosy.

First, we’re dividing into a country of the super rich and the burgeoning working poor living unpleasantly. The movement of quality manufacturing jobs in the auto and steel industries to the South tells part of that story. The high-wage jobs of Michigan and the unionized North — jobs that pay about $35 an hour — to the union-free auto plants and factories of the South, which pay $14 an hour, is a harbinger of the future. Can less be more?

If the United States is going to have told hold down its wages, then we should fix the living space; that means the infrastructure. It’s a mess and it’ll take decades to bring it up to the standards of much of the rest of the world.

We need better roads (less time in traffic), repaired bridges, sewers, water systems and public transportation. We also should fix the parks — state and national — and build pedestrian areas where we can enjoy the great natural beauty of our rivers and woodlands. London and Paris and Vienna make their rivers places of beauty and recreation. New York runs highways along its rivers — highways where it should have cafes. Los Angeles has enclosed its streams in concrete.

London has refurbished Brunel's masterpiece of design St. Pancras railway station to accommodate the new 200-mph trains that will whisk you to Paris in a little over two hours. Both the station and the trains are great achievements; achievements that can be enjoyed by traveler and visitor alike.

By contrast Union Station in Washington, D.C., a masterpiece in its day, is a mess. The tracks are inadequate. The station seating is inadequate, broken and mostly an afterthought. The restrooms are inadequate and dirty. The majesty of the station has been destroyed by tawdry retailers and half-finished repairs. Decay permeates the place — maybe to prepare the passengers for the disreputable taxis outside.

What an introduction to the capital of the free world. However, if you’ve just arrived on Amtrak, you might already be so dispirited you won't notice.

Likewise, the nation's schools need to be renovated. Leaky buildings seem more designed to prepare students for a lifetime of failure and decline than for a life of pride and accomplishment. “We make buildings and they make us,” Winston Churchill said.

The case for fixing the nation's infrastructure is compelling. But it does not compel in Congress. Congress is hell-bent to hurt the infrastructure with cost cutting-measures that will — as has happened in Britain and Spain — as likely as not add to the deficit rather than reducing it.

A more believable use of the government's resources might be to start fixing America by diverting some of the defense budget to sprucing up and repairing the nation, yielding results in a time frame of 25 to 50 years.

The story of another Churchill saying goes like this:

Churchill was walking in the garden of his beloved home, Chartwell, when he summoned the gardener and said, “I want you to plant an oak tree here.”

The gardener, looking to Churchill and seeing a man approaching 90, said, “But sir, it’ll take a hundred years to grow.”

“Well, you had better plant it now, hadn't you?” averred Churchill.

Quite so. The future awaits. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

CFS: One Disease and Its Costs

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What would happen to health care if a million new patients with just one of many now incurable and largely untreated diseases flooded the system, relying on medicine that could cost $70,000?

It might happen. Actually, it’s more than desirable that it should happen.

In one instance, a million or more patients who suffer from the devastating, life-robbing disease known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), or myalgic encephalomyelitis, struggle through days of almost total incapacitation, disorientation, pain and despair, clinging to hope that science will rescue them. All that’s known is that like AIDS, it’s a disease of the immune system.

The horror of this affliction is almost indescribable. I’ve been writing and broadcasting about these patients for several years and never have I seen such extended suffering, lives hollowed out, every tomorrow to be feared, the slightest departure from strict routines of inactivity to be met with punishing suffering.

The mother of an afflicted teenager told me that for New Year, her daughter went out for amid celebration. That exertion cost her two weeks in bed.

My friend and colleague (we host a YouTube channel, mecfsalert), Deborah Waroff, a New York-based writer, has been afflicted for 23 years and has seen her life confiscated. Like other patients she lives in a prison of her body with painful memories of when she was well. The body hurts, the memory tortures. Sleep does not refresh and long hours in bed do not heal.

Sufferers, held together in their pain by the Internet, trade sad notes. Going the rounds now is Winston Churchill’s statement in old age his life was finished but not ended. One sufferer e-mails me that she prays every night that she won’t wake up in the morning.

Patients groups say suicide rates are high. Determining the morbidity rate is a challenge because sufferers die from opportunistic infections rather than from CFS. In this, and other ways, it resembles AIDS and diabetes.

So far, the burden has been carried more by families and loved ones than by the health care industry. This is because there is no diagnosis per se for CFS, and no cure.

Dr. Andreas Kogelnik of the Open Medicine Institute in Mountain View, Calif., says there are no “markers” for the disease. There is nothing in the blood, marrow or soft tissue that identifies the disease.

Therefore, diagnosing the disease is by elimination – a time-consuming undertaking that the present medical regime is ill-equipped to provide. “You can’t do much in 10 minutes,” Kolgelnik says, referring to average amount of time allotted to patients by doctors.

So this is a disease that, even without a cure, the medical establishment has already indicated that it cannot afford.

The matter of affordability, for example, has affected diagnosis and treatment severely in the United Kingdom. There the National Health Service, always struggling with budgets, has encouraged doctors to teat CFS as a psychosomatic condition related to depression. The patients hate this and only recently has the British Medical Research Council softened its position.

That other medical nostrum, diet and exercise, is favored in the UK, too, but not by patients. They write to me constantly pointing out that exercise is corporal punishment for them; a recipe for relapse.

With only under-funded research scattered across the country at clinics and universities, the picture is bleak. But there are two pinpricks of light: a Norwegian cancer drug, Rituxan, which has helped patients in Norway and Germany, and a drug that is still in clinical trials in the United States, Ampligen, which rebalances the immune system.

Even those who administer the drugs, like Dr. Derek Enlander in New York and Kogelnik in California, don’t hail them as panaceas but as hopeful pacesetters. Neither is available except to a few patients in trials. And cost? Ampligen costs about $25,000 for a year of treatment, and Rituxan comes in at a whopping $70,000.

A slew of other diseases await expensive cures. In the future health-care costs, no matter what the Supreme Court and the politicians do, are going to go up and up. To the sick and their families, any price is a small one.

For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate.

Universal Health Care — It’s Addictive

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Opponents of President Obama's health care legislation were wise to attack it preemptively in the courts on constitutional grounds.

If they hadn't attacked now, they would've learned that universal health care systems – sometimes a hybrid of public and private and sometimes single-payer national systems – are wildly popular in other countries.

So popular that politicians can do no more than fiddle at the edges, as they have done in Britain recently and are about to do in France. No leader, not even that incontrovertible defender of private enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, dared or even thought, to privatize health care.

In the industrial democracies, from Canada to Japan, people complain about their health care systems and would defend them to the death. Once universal health care is introduced and people are relieved of the fear of illness, leading to financial ruin, it is unrepealable.

The opponents of Obamacare must know this, or they wouldn't have been so anxious to test it in court on the grounds of the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Kill it before people love it was an imperative.

Now it's widely believed, after three days of hearings, in which conservative justices sounded more like they were conducting a congressional hearing than a judicial one, that Obamacare will be thrown out before it has ever been sampled by the public, which wouldn't come until 2014. It's been a bit like the Chinese and democracy: Don't let them try it, they might like it.

So how is it the Republicans have been able to so demonize Obamacare? Partly, it's because the administration has done an appalling job of selling its own program. It's almost as though it's ashamed of its offspring because it isn't the child they really wanted: a simpler bill with a public option and such goodies as interstate insurance sales.

The administration is frequently bad at trumpeting its achievements. As health care reform is its defining domestic issue, the fact that Obama and his cabinet have not extolled the virtues of the bill amounts to a curious dereliction, a sin of omission.

Most people have been persuaded, if they know anything about the bill at all, that it's socialized medicine (it is not); that it will double expenditures on health care (it won't); that it's an enormous new dictatorial intrusion into individual liberty (it's not).

It's not a great bill, but a good start.

We in the United States spend about twice as much as other countries on health care – about 18 percent of our gross domestic product.

Why? Everyone knows there's excessive testing and waste. The quick answer is to defend against lawsuits. Another answer is that doctors have no incentive to save money and through their investments in testing companies, often they have an incentive to order up the tests.

Mostly, I suspect it's just indifference; the medical equivalent of not turning the lights off.

I don't like Obamacare because it only does half the job and I'm uneasy about the individual mandate. Just two cheers from me.

The uninsured should be assigned an insurer and the premium collected through the tax system. That way the insurers would compete for the most desirable prospects, young adults, and a real pool would operate.

Another question that isn't asked: As new technology usually brings down costs, why does this not apply in health care? Why are CAT scans and MRIs not getting cheaper, as they would if they were in a different framework?

Why not use the Republican idea of health vouchers as an incentive to keep patients from frivolous use of services – not as the substitute for insurance, but rather as an incentive mechanism. Pay them to stay healthy.

We suffer from a failure of imagination in health care.

There are good reasons to be ambivalent about Obamacare, but it's a start, a building block. Our medicine is without peer, but our concepts of care are quite sickly. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Obama and Energy: What He Can and Can’t Do

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When the Obama administration seeks to explain its oil policy, it changes the subject mid-sentence.
 
The most frequent practitioner of this verbal contortion is the president's press secretary, Jay Carney. It is as though he's a magician who has promised to pull a live rabbit from his top hat. This conjurer stands before his audience, recites some incantations and, poof, retrieves not a live rabbit, but a dead chicken.
 
Carney, like others in the administration, starts talking about oil and switches to talking about "alternatives." The alternatives, with the exception of the nettlesome subject of biofuels (nettlesome because they produce little or no energy above what's invested in producing them), are ways of making electricity.
 
The administration is adept at confusing these almost unrelated subjects.
 
Oil is the stubborn problem. It affects every aspect of life and prosperity, from the balance of payments to war planning, from economic growth to our relationship with China. Worse, it may be in constrained supply for the rest of time, as the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – continue to suck up the precious commodity.
 
New finds and technology relieve the gloom for a while, but as demand rises and supply struggles to adjust, the problem remains – even though conservative think tanks and trade groups fight the notion of structural shortage.
 
But the United States isn't short of electricity and has no need ever to be. The electricity problem, if there is one, is environmental. Do we continue to burn coal on a massive scale while we search for an environmental fix? Or do we go wholeheartedly for nuclear – even though the Obama administration has abandoned the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada?
 
Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and even biomass energy come under the rubric of "alternatives" – and they're all electricity technologies.
Then there's natural gas, thought to be exhausted in the United States, but now in abundance as a result of sophisticated technologies. That's another electricity fuel.
 
It's enthusiasm for alternatives (a longtime love affair on the left) that has encouraged the confusing White House utterances about a policy of "all of the above." It's this that has spread the public perception that the president can do something about the price of gasoline. And it's this that makes him vulnerable to scorn over debacles like the loan guarantees to the solar-array manufacturer Solyndra.
 
If Obama's reelection hopes aren't to be extinguished at the gas pump this November, he needs to separate oil from electricity – and the future from the present. He can't affect world oil prices, and he can't drill enough holes in the United States to change the world oil market.
 
But he can change the debate, and push down the price somewhat, by taking up arms not against the oil producers, but rather against the oil traders, who are the market movers. They are concentrated in the New York Mercantile Exchange, where they daily bid up the price in a spiral that is unrelated to cost. The price of oil is set by traders, who use rumor, fear, and the knowledge that producers will be silent partners to jack it up.
 
They aren't phantoms. They are real, flesh-and-blood people who manipulate the markets daily. What's happening to oil in the New York Mercantile Exchange is what happened to electricity prices in California when Enron's traders were running wild.
 
There have even been shenanigans at the Cushing tank farm in Oklahoma, the installation that President Obama toured on Thursday. He might do well to read Leah McGrath Goodman's Fortune magazine article this month, on how ConocoPhillips warehoused oil at Cushing. That oil came in by the same pipeline that the new owners have now reversed, she writes, and it's now flowing to refineries by the very route it came in, but at higher prices.
 
Goodman knows what she's talking about. The former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote The Asylum, the definitive book about the New York Mercantile Exchange and the madness of oil trading.
 
Obama could jawbone the traders while providing more resources and moral support to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the poodle trying to do a pit bull's work.

Mass-Transit Enthusiasts: Get on the Bus

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Even railroad fanatics like me have to admit that the future of passenger transportation by rail, particularly urban commuter rail, is pretty well frozen where it is. New rail – even light rail, an idealistic indulgence – is doomed by high costs, lack of appropriate track, and political squabbling.

New subways, the elegant way to get around a city, by going under it, are an almost impossible dream. The costs are too great in times of austerity, and the costs of maintenance can be prohibitive as a system ages.

Increasingly, the future appears to be the humble bus. Buses have low capital costs, are flexible, and can be adjusted to demand and population changes in ways trains cannot.

Spare the groaning: The buses are coming. And today's bus need not be yesterday's – noisy, smelly, and unreliable.

London, which has possibly the best transportation infrastructure in the world, with a huge rail network, is nonetheless betting on buses. It's deploying a new bus that is designed for the times and preserves some of the features that have made its buses emblematic of the city, like the two decks. And, yes, they are red.

The new London buses are a meeting of nostalgia with high-tech and environmental sensibility. London was busy phasing out its traditional buses in favor of articulated buses, which bend in the middle, when a controversial and eccentric Conservative journalist turned politician, Boris Johnson, declared that if he were elected mayor, he would save the old buses, or at least the concept of double-deck buses. He won the election and ideas were sought from the public.

The result is what the tabloids call the "Boris Bus." It's a high-tech beauty that meets many demands. It has two doors and two staircases, but it's so low that wheelchairs are easily accommodated.

They are designed to have conductors during rush hours and to be operated by drivers only at other times.

They use modern composite materials from the airline industry and are hybrids, with diesel engines and regenerative breaking. That has made way for the lowering of the bottom deck, increasing stability while reducing weight.

The initial reception of this high-tech scion of the old and loved London bus has been so enthusiastic that Johnson is talked about as a future Conservative prime minister – riding the bus to the highest office in the land.

Back to our buses. They, too, are getting better, but less dramatically so. Between Washington and New York, there's now thriving bus service with half a dozen competing firms offering WiFi, toilets, and many points of departure. The ticket price, about $20 each way, is a fraction of those for Amtrak and airlines.

These intercity buses are diesel-powered, but many cities are using natural-gas-powered buses. That might yet seal the deal for buses as the future of urban transportation, reducing the use of cars. America is awash in natural gas. It also has less environmental impact.

Buses are at their best when, as my wife pointed out in London once, they run like conveyors. Frequently, that means enough dedicated bus lanes.

The Obama administration would be well advised to launch a bus initiative with emphasis on better vehicles, à la London, and dedicated bus lanes. The solution to urban congestion may be in a high-speed, WiFi-equipped, natural-gas-powered bus. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Politicos Know for Sure Where the Oil Is

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Lemuel Gulliver is back! You remember him – he’s the hero of “Gulliver’s Travels,” a satire written by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726.

Many adventures befall Gulliver, but the one most remembered is that he's captured and pinned down with innumerable strings by the tiny Lilliputians. By their standards, he was a giant, but they tied him down so well that he was helpless.

That, according to those seeking the Republican presidential  nomination, is the state of the U.S. energy industry – by energy, they mean oil and gas.

According to Newt Gingrich, who's echoed by frontrunner Mitt Romney and his two rivals, the oil and gas industries have been cruelly tied down by government, which imposes onerous environmental regulations and restricts drilling in the most hopeful parts of our ocean shelves and on federal lands.

If these lands and ocean sites were just opened to drilling, the Republican hopefuls argue, the United States would become the world’s greatest energy producer, as it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Drill, baby, drill and a gigantic cornucopia of energy awaits; energy for the United States and the world.

Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the take-no-prisoners trade association that represents nearly 500 oil and gas companies, is a vocal advocate of more drilling in more places. He's a Gulliver theorist.

From Republicans and the oil industry, this is a new optimism born of an old idea. The old idea is that if you drill enough holes in enough places, oil will be abundant.

That optimism has existed more in the fringe world of wildcatting than it did in the big oil companies, which knew that there were limited reserves of recoverable oil and gas in the United States. They also knew that once a reserve is in production, you can calculate the point at which it will decline; as has happened with the North Slope of Alaska, where less than half the 2 million barrels a day produced at its peak is flowing today.

Then came the new technologies, largely developed by the despised government. Now in full deployment, these technologies have incontrovertibly changed expectations for natural gas but their impact on oil is debatable.

The first of these  is  3-D seismic mapping. Advanced physics enables the companies to determine very accurately how much hydrocarbon a particular formation underground might contain. Gone are the days when the hard-drinking wildcatter followed his gut and mysterious patterns in the tumbleweed.

Next, is the hole itself. At one time, a well was a well – drilled straight down, looking for a pool of oil, a cavern of gas or both. Fracturing – the process in which water, chemicals and other substances are injected down the hole to break up rock in proximity to the hole – has been used to release more of the good stuff. With time fracturing, also called “fracking,” has become more sophisticated.

What has made the euphoria of the politicians and oil lobbyists possible is the miracle of horizontal drilling, which allows as many as eight holes to be spread out for miles from a single shaft. This and better fracking has changed the prospects for gas out of all hope, and has somewhat improved oil expectations.

Much of the enthusiasm for new drilling has come from the success of the new technologies in North Dakota, which has overnight become the the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the Union. But beware. This isn’t Texas circa 1945.

Oil from North Dakota's Bakken Field isn’t cheap. Its “lifting cost” is among the most expensive there is: It costs about $50 a barrel to bring North Dakota oil to the surface, compared with about $15 in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Is it oil or incense?

API’s Gerard told reporters in a telephone conversation, designed to preempt President Obama’s “all of the above” energy recommendations, that technology in its inevitable advance would keep the oil flowing for many generations.

Only the government, in Gerard’s view, stands between the American people and abundant oil.

However, fields that have peaked – like the North Slope and much of Texas, Louisiana and the North Sea –  have seen declining production and no technology has been enough to revive them. All the oil has been removed. Gone, baby, gone.

More drilling has already improved domestic oil production. But will unfettered drilling really make a new Saudi Arabia of the. United States? Can the resource base stand the exploitation? Can Gulliver actually stand up?

The next generation of technology won’t put more oil in the ground. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate